Margaret Eliza "Maggie" Kuhn was born on August 3, 1905, in Buffalo, New York, the eldest of two children.
Maggie Kuhn was born on August 3, 1905, in Buffalo, New York, to Samuel F. Kuhn, a credit manager, and Minnie Louise Kuhn. She grew up in a middle-class Presbyterian household that later moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where she was raised alongside her younger brother.
From an early age, Kuhn displayed an independent, questioning spirit, influenced in part by her mother's suffragist sympathies and her own observations of gender inequities. She attended Flora Stone Mather College (the women's college of Case Western Reserve University), graduating in 1926 with degrees in English and sociology.
This early exposure to social issues and higher education laid the groundwork for a lifetime devoted to social justice work, first in religious and social service organizations, and later as the founder of a national movement for the rights of older Americans. Her birth in the early twentieth century placed her generation at the crossroads of tremendous social change, including women's suffrage, two world wars, and the civil rights movement — all of which shaped her activist worldview.
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